Age under-estimation in New Zealand porbeagle sharks (Lamna nasus): is there an upper limit to ages that can be determined from shark vertebrae?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Annual deposition of growth bands in vertebrae has been validated for many shark species, and is now widely regarded as the norm. However, vertebrae are part of the shark’s axial skeleton, and band deposition may stop in old sharks when somatic growth ceases. We aged vertebral sections from New Zealand porbeagle sharks (Lamna nasus) under reflected white light and using X-radiographs. Bomb radiocarbon assays supported vertebral age estimates up to ~20 years, but not at older ages. The results suggest that older porbeagles were under-aged by as much as 50% from vertebral band counts, presumably because band width declined to a point where it became unresolvable. This has important implications for growth studies on other long-lived sharks. Estimated ages at sexual maturity were 8–11 years for males and 15–18 years for females, and longevity may be ~65 years. New Zealand and North Atlantic porbeagles differ in these parameters, and in length at maturity and maximum length, suggesting genetic isolation of the two populations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it